Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

They argued among themselves and with their Democratic colleagues over how far Congress could go in constraining the police powers of the states, whether the right to vote was a “civil right,” and whether Congress had authority to enforce the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause. Even in a moment of extraordinary, almost unimaginable change, everyone carried forward political ideas and vocabularies forged in previous engagements. For Republicans, this meant invoking the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the immorality of racist laws. For Democrats, it was recourse to the argument, long used in the service of white supremacy, that states were entitled to identify, regulate, and even exclude populations they considered undesirable. The measures that emerged from that cauldron of ideology and Realpolitik marked a radical departure from the past.